Documents / Official release
This FBI file serial collects 1947 Army Air Forces reports on flying disc sightings. It includes Air Defense Command interviews from September 1947 with Pan American pilot Alpheus Powell and navigator Walter White about orange objects seen near Boston on 4 August 1947. It also holds a Birmingham, Alabama report with a photograph, newspaper clippings and a sergeant's sworn statement, Newfoundland and Alaska sighting reports, notes on an instrument found in Illinois, and a Weather Bureau memo on a metallic disk.
From the source:Release of 2026-05-08 Incident: N/A, N/A. The FBI's 62-HQ-83894 case file includes investigative records, eyewitness testimonies, and public reports concerning Unidentified Flying Objects and flying discs documented between June 1947 and July 1968. The records include high-profile incident accounts, photographic evidence from sites like Oak Ridge, TN, and technical proposals regarding potential propulsion systems. Additional topics include convention programs, researcher accounts, and extensive media coverage from the period. This file is partially posted on FBI vault with more redactions and some pages missing. Included here is the complete case file with several newly declassified pages and only minor redactions.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
are reflected from some bright object in or on the car or plane, the up and down motion of the car or plane causes the flying discs to appear to be going through a dipping and rising motion, or, if the reflecting object is stationary and the car moving, the results will be the same. The statement that the discs appeared to be rotating as they sailed through the atmosphere is due to the vibration of the automobile or plane. Vibrations make them appear to be rotating at a very high rate of speed. Vibration is what gives them a flat or disc-like shape also. If you wish to see some flying discs, make a drive at about dusk or at night, open your ventilation wing window at about a 45° angle from the drivers seat and watch the reflections of the stationary electric lights that appear on your left, if you are driving, after you pass them, and see how many discs you can observe flying through the air. If there are not too many lights to your rear, you may have a perfect formation of beautiful flying discs which may be red, green or silver according to the color of the electric lights which you have passed. They appear most realistic when traveling about forty-five or fifty miles per hour. If you do not get satisfactory results from your first experiments, try again. After you have learned when and where to look for them, your observations become more pleasing and interesting. Even the lights of an approaching automobile from your rear may appear as one flying disc in your ventilation wing. The reflections of the approaching lights will appear in your ventilation wing unless the side of your car protrudes out so far as to prevent the light beam from shining on the wing.
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 126 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.